As we had reported a while back, GameSpy had announced that they would be shutting down its services at the end of May. This meant that many games would be affected by its closure and have its multiplayer aspects taken offline. While some of the games are pretty old, some of them are still popular for multiplayer.

The good news is that for fans of the Halo franchise, it looks like multiplayer for Halo: Combat Evolved for the PC will be kept online, although it will be through a third-party software that will be performing the matchmaking. This is a feature that would have been lost when GameSpy is taken offline.

GameRanger will be replacing GameSpy and it is also free, which is good news for gamers. GameRanger will also support other Halo games such as Halo: Combat Evolved Demo and Halo: Custom Edition in addition to Combat Evolved.

However for gamers of other games like Crysis, they’d be out of luck. EA has also recently listed several games which will be affected by GameSpy’s shutdown, but at the same time will be making efforts to maintain multiplayer functionality for some of its Battlefield titles. So if you still fire up the occasional Halo: Combat Evolved multiplayer game, you can rest assured knowing that GameSpy’s shutdown will not affect your experience.